Christmas
by lemon meringue tie
Summary: Keiko enjoys having all her family for a picture perfect Christmas. Hao learns the reason why Yoh and the rest of his family hates it.


_Drabble_

"_What_?"

He had at least expected—in the most polite sense and most predictable—a flat out death threat or at least something obvious along those lines.

"Christmas." His father said rather flatly. "You know, the holiday?"

He let the sarcasm slide off his back. "I _know_."

"Good then."

Mikihisa flipped a page in his book. Icha Icha Paradise, the Shaman noted dully. His mother would be rather furious to see her husband's nose buried in _that _certain atrocity.

He was getting impatient. There were people waiting for him. "What about it?"

"Christmas is a day that you spend with your family." Mikihisa said slowly, like he was talking to a slow, dimwitted child. "You are family."

"With people who would try to kill me at moments notice?"

His father shrugged indecisively. "Well…maybe your grandfather."

He frowned. Whatever happened to the rest of the clan of rabid batshit crazy shamans who were after his blood to the point they sent his younger brother of one minute to kill him with a stone sword? Watching his father's face, as the man flipped another page in his extremely perverted book, he wondered.

But only one real question came to mind. "Why?"

Mikihisa had the gall to look affronted. "I don't know."

"Don't know? Then why do I have to go?"

"Your mother." His father answered, as if it was the answer to god's greatest and most confusing questions.

"What about her—

"Wants you home for Christmas."

He hadn't expected that. "But why would she?"

"Think of her as a very, very scheming part psychotic woman who enjoys spending one holiday a year to torture every other member of her family in what turns out to be one of the most horrid events of the season."

"Christmas?"

"Exactly." Another nod. Mikihisa seemed very well versed in this speech.

"And Yoh?"

"She wants all her ducklings back for the holidays." He shrugged noncommittally. "You know…you, Yoh, your sister…"

"I have a _sister_?"

His father gave him a blank look. "…Never mind. Anyways, she wants you there by December 23; you shouldn't have any Shaman Fights until the first week in January."

"The Patch is in on this too?"

"Your mother is a very influential person."

Once again, as if that solves the entire dilemma. But his father only flipped another page, giggling slightly as he did so. This was another one of those points in time he didn't want to know what the man was thinking.

"So you'll go? Not that you have any choice in the matter." He added slightly.

"What do you mean by that?"

"Your mother." Yet another time, as if that's the answer to everything.

He was growing irritated. "I don't understand how that answers my question."

"Maybe you don't now," The man wondered thoughtfully. "But you will eventually."

--

Now. He understood why his mother's mere name or her title voiced in passing was enough to quake Yoh whenever Anna threatened it with him. He vaguely remembered watching his dear brother shrink as Anna thoughtfully suggested sending him home for a little 'break'. And now, as the woman fluttered and cooed about him, he fully understood why his brother was so very, very afraid.

"Ohmigosh! You have such adorable cheeks—

He could have groaned. Hatred he could take without batting an eye lash. But smothering? Hao would have rather it stayed a foreign subject than be submitted to the horrible, _pinching of cheeks_. When he sent a glare to his father leaning in the corner—his Icha Icha book covered with the book jacket of 'Tuesday's with Morrie'—Mikihisa only said that it was his own fault for thinking he could get away from this for fifteen years and think there were no repercussions.

While his mother fawned about him, he noticed with a distinct satisfaction that Yoh's own cheeks were still red from the pinching. His younger looked thoroughly defeated.

When he went to greet him, he expected something more along the lines of, 'You!!'

Instead, his twin looked at him dully.

"Oh god. She got you too?" He spoke as if they were trapped in a jail cell and he was talking to a fellow gang member.

"You all act as if this is a horrible event."

"It _is_." He buried his face in his hands.

Their mother danced over to them, grinning widely as she did so. "Oh my dear ducklings! It's so good to have both of you home!"

Yoh looked resigned to his fate, as both of them were crushed in a hug that could probably suffocate any lesser man. Their mother however, did not seem phased in the slightest as she gave them another round of extremely hurtful cheek pinching, giggling about how adorably cute and cuddly her ducklings grew up to be as she rubbed their cheeks. He half heartedly felt himself become upset over the, 'cute and cuddly' part before his already hurting cheeks got rubbed again.

"Off to bed duckies! We have a _big _day tomorrow!" She sing-songed, before twirling back to her cooking.

"The bedrooms are here." His younger brother sounded very dull, beckoning him to follow.

Considering the Asakura house large would be an understatement. This place was _massive_. He could barely remember it from his memory of over a thousand years ago, but he could tell this place had at least tripled in size. It was like a maze, rooms and rooms and more rooms and occasionally a very spacious tea room or something like that, but Yoh, who looked deader than one of Mari's dolls, dragged his feet through hallways like a death walk.

"You act like this place is a death sentence." He commented thoughtfully.

"It is." Yoh retorted scornfully. Although, he noted that the scorn was more on being here than on actually him. Which was odd. Usually it was pointed at him.

"It's not _horrible_." He said evenly. "Your mother's very nice."

"Our mother." His younger brother corrected quickly. "And it is. Don't worry, by tomorrow you'll understand why."

Okay, so the check pinching wasn't exactly pleasant, if anything, it hurt like hell and his cheeks were still flaming hot and felt like someone had slapped his five times over, and his ears were still ringing from her coos and squeals, but it wasn't exactly unpleasant to have a mother that loved you. There were no crude or disgusted thoughts in her head.

In fact, her thoughts were somewhere along the lines of 'Ohmigosh my son is the most adorable thing in the universe— and so on.

Strange. Every other Asakura member they passed had little to no hostility to him, and if there were they didn't voice it. Only fear. Dreaded fear as if there life was subjected to torture of the worst kind. But what was weird, was that it was also directed at Yoh. He wondered why, wasn't Yoh supposed to be their savior who would destroy him?

"They're not afraid of you." He vaguely wondered if Yoh had inherited some of his Reishi ability. "They're afraid of mother."

"Why?"

"You'll find out soon." His brother only said.

Yoh slid one of the sliding doors open, revealing a young girl who looked distinctly like them staring in front of a screen, eyes blank and unwavering. He remembered his father saying something about having a sister, but he had never paid much attention to that because he was always watching over Yoh's progress.

She looked like them, brown reddish hair, and brown eyes. Well, more like him because they both had long hair, but her bangs were cut differently.

They could have been triplets.

"If you didn't know," Yoh began, as he lifelessly fell onto one of the futons. "This is Sora. Sora, say hi."

"Hi." She didn't even look at him.

Hao shrugged indifferently. "I didn't know we had a sister."

"Yeah, me either." Yoh scoffed. "Until I was dragged to another Christmas (Hao noticed that both of them shuddered at the word) and my mother said she had forgotten to tell me I had one."

"I was lucky." The girl vouched. "I was at boarding school and didn't have to…be subjected to this…

"Torture? Hell hole? Jail? House of batshit crazy insane creatures?" Yoh cut in.

"All of the above."

"What's so bad about Christmas?" The pyromaniac wondered. When he was younger, in his past lives when people celebrated the famed holiday, he was always envious of them. But these two talked of it as if it were death in itself.

"Everything." His sister shuddered. "God…you have no idea do you? It's like being subjected to Seventy-Two hours of pure hell."

"Cheek pinching is only the beginning." Yoh added glumly.

"You're so lucky." His sister directed it at him. "You got away before you were subjected to this _torture_."

"Torture?"

"Picture taking. Lots of it. The relatives who love, _love _to pinch your cheeks—even you, they really don't care if you've tried to kill them. It's the cheeks that count. And dinner…oh god dinner…"

Both of them looked as if they stared death in the face, he could read enough of their thoughts to know whatever memory they were recalling was horrid.

His sister—whom he had met for a total of about five minutes now—took another look on the TV screen, a boy with bleached blond bangs placing a Go stone, before she frowned thoughtfully. He remembered the game from back in the Heain period when he was born in the beginning.

"Okay." His sister took another sweep around the room. "I can't hear them anymore, here's the game plan."

She took out a worn outline of the new Asakura estate, equipped with exit strategies drawn and a full circle of guards in their appropriate places. Yoh looked up glumly from his futon, watching with a certain disinterest as his sister moved her fingers around the drawing.

"Now, we take the window on the west wing, but we have to cross through these bushes into the East side. After that, we need to wait about ten minutes until the guard shifts, and dodge through these hedges to get to the main wall—

"Why can't we just use shamanic powers to get out?" Hao asked bluntly. And why did they have to get out anyways?

Yoh yawned. "They'll notice. And we tried three years ago to do it, no one's allowed to use furyoku unless it's out in the training grounds."

"Why?"

"Mother." The two said in unison, just as flatly. Once again, as if it was the word that solved the problem.

"It wouldn't work." Yoh interrupted the silence thoughtfully, pointing to the blue print of the hedges. "It says their only three feet tall and about a foot wide. They could see…especially if Kaa-san dresses us up in…_that_."

He was confused, but he had a feeling it was better if he didn't know. "In what?"

"Christmas pictures." The two looked at him as if the word was the summoning spell of the devil himself..

"What happens with these…Christmas pictures?"

"We dress up like Chinese dolls." His sister squatted in front of the blue prints, erasing and sketching with a pencil. "Sit around for about four hours in front of a blue screen and pretend like everything is jolly like rainbows and puppy dogs with pancakes on their heads."

"Don't forget the smiles." Yoh rubbed his already sore cheeks, sending him a pointed look, that had nothing to do with hatred, or rivalry, or at this point, anything to do with shamanism at all. "She makes you smile. For _hours_."

"I couldn't feel my face!" His sister bemoaned.

Yoh was too busy staring at the blue prints. "I don't see a way out."

"What?!" She pressed her face closer to the blue prints.

There was silence. In which Hao contemplated why he was here, why his apparent sister-twice-removed nor his brother was looking at him—or thinking—maliciously of him. And the rest of the Asakura family. It seemed as if they had completely forgotten who he was in this season of utter…dread. His siblings looked desperate, searching for a way out of this fate that was apparently worse than his entire eternity in hell.

"I can't find one." Sora, her name was, sighed.

"We're doomed." His younger brother echoed.

--

In the end, Hao realized exactly why his brother, his sister, his father, and his two extremely growth stunted grandparents hated Christmas, and were deathly afraid of Keiko in the same way they were deathly afraid of him. Well, their fear of him when it _wasn't _anywhere near Christmas time. In the end, he couldn't feel his entire face because his cheeks had been pinched and he had to frown to stop smiling.

He had volunteered to take his brother back with him to the Shaman Fight, mainly because of the empathy he felt for the poor half of his soul who had to sit through _that _every single year. And if he hadn't taken him back with him on the Spirit of Fire, then his little brother would have had to stay there for another week.

Hao learned the reason that his mother was feared—in a different way then he was. In a more happy bunny rabbits with pink stuffing and puppies with pancakes on their heads and rainbows and hello kitty. And in a way, it was much more feared then him anyways.

"Just in case…" Yoh was looking at the ground passing by, still shaking. "This is never spoken aloud. Okay?"

"Got it."

And now, whenever someone brought up the dreaded Christian holiday, both of them shuddered.


End file.
